The first thing that came to mind when I first laid eyes on my new Gigabyte 990FX UD7 board was that it was quite the beautiful board. Much respect for the simple PCIE 16x slot latches, the Crosshair V uses a more traditional type, and sleek heatsink design.

EDIT: It should be noted that I received a revision 1.1 board from Newegg Canada, and that it does have Load Line Calibration (LLC) controls in the bios.

The new Team Xtreem DDR3 ram has a cheap but cool looking reflecting sticker, but what is most appealing are the stats: 2400 Mhz @ Cl9, which is only surpassed by Corsair's grossly overpriced and discontinued Dominator GT dual channel flagship memory.

The memory height is not found online, and could be helpful to potential buyers.

Team Xtreem memory height : 52mm

Promlatech Genesis allowed height: 54mm

So this is awfully close to the tallest ram you could use with this cooler. I have seen Dominator GT ram at a height of 54mm barley fitting underneath the heat sink, found here, and a 53 mm Corsair Vengeance stick here.

We see that for the benchmarks used in Part I of my review, FX only falls signficantly behind when only a single thread is used. When only one core is being used we see a 25-40% benefit per Ghz for the 3770k over the FX 8150.

When all threads can be used, Bulldozer does a good job of making up for the lost single threaded performance. Scaling for FX outshines the i7 3770k by a significant margin. Most notably with techarp's x264 HD, where my FX 8150 @ 4.9 Ghz beats a 5.0 Ghz 2600k, and narrowly loses to a 4.9 Ghz 3770k. (Check source 19)

In TrueCrypt 7.1a we see a 4.9 Ghz FX 8150 performing slightly better than its 22nm 3770k intel counterpart at 4.7 Ghz.

In 7-Zip we see the FX 8150 jumping 2.7 % percent ahead of its 3770k counterpart at the same 4.9 Ghz clock for Compression, but falling behind 2.7% with decompression.

The temperature of a 3770k is also seen to sky-rocket up to 78C during a SuperPi 32m test, while my FX 8150 doest hit above 59C.

Next week well see how my GPU handles graphically intensive workloads on my new Gigabyte board.

Stay Tuned! I am free to answer any questions and also am willing to take any requests you guys might have!

you say the IB skyrocked to 78c during super pi, what cooler was used on the 3770k? you didnt mention SB temps during that test. I will post up a 32m super pi at 4.7ghz and my max temp. temps on cpu`s are not valid unless the same cooler and TIM are used as well as case and ambient temps

Thanks for the info. Sandy bridge generally runs less hot than ivy at the same high overclock, and it looks like to get to 4.9 ghz on ivy voltage is pushed enough to put the chip in a very hot region. (especially around 1.5v in the data point). My chips at 1.45V and doesnt go above 59C on the hottest core, your chip at 1.41V gets 64C on its hottest core. Yet my chip is notoriously more power hungry while overclocked.

Another factor that allows them to only be compared with a grain of salt is how intel and amd chips measure temps differently. But the 28C difference just shows that its generally hotter, not that its exactly 28C hotter in all cases.

Ill be doing a power consumption comparison as well due to high demand.

Nonetheless Superpi scores are a bad representation, by themselves, of the overall capabilities of each chip, performance wise. In each case, 78c and 59C are at the lower spectrums of temperatures for each chip. I will retest with 3DMark 11, where Tweaktown has shown 3770k temps approaching 100C.